Every time I take an international trip and reinforce my physical sense of the world as a single, connected physical planet (views out the window of vast oceans, continental shores etc) I am reminded of the utter bullshittiness of anti-globalism... (1/few)
are domesticated agriculturalist city-building humans the same as the ancestral nomadic hunter-gatherer humans? has it been long enough (in terms of selection pressure) that we're now something different than what we came from?
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I don’t think so. Against the Grain by James Scott specifically argues that sedenterization by agriculture in near east happened against very stiff resistance. 10k years since Neolithic is mere instant in evolutionary time.
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too little time for much accumulation of gradual changes. not all evolution is gradual though. hell, not all evolution is genetic, for that matter. do humans with sufficiently different cultural histories count as different varieties?
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Step-function evolution tends to be pointillist in effects, like lactose tolerance. Nomadic —> Sedentary is too broad-based a shift. As for memetic evolution, it seems to reshape extended phenotype rather than deep psyche. We reproduce paleo-nomad forms in new environment.
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conjecture, just for fun: suppose the adaptation is not nomadic -> sedentary but is rather in social cognition group size limit ~1000 (tribe scale) -> 1 million (city scale)?
End of conversation
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